Live from DevOpsDays Portland, I speak with Gene Kim, Author of "The Phoenix Project" and the upcoming book "The Unicorn Project." When I started this podcast, one of my goals was to talk to Gene about his own experiences in IT, thankfully this trip to DevOpsDays in PDX helped that happen. Cameos by Jennifer Davis, Matty Stratton, Jason Yee and Terri Haber!

Gene Kim is a multiple award-winning CTO, researcher and author, and has been studying high-performing technology organizations since 1999. He was founder and CTO of Tripwire for 13 years. He has written five books, including “The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win”, “The DevOps Handbook”, “Accelerate” and the upcoming “The Unicorn Project”. Since 2014, he has been the organizer of the DevOps Enterprise Summit, studying the technology transformations of large, complex organizations.

The On-Call Nightmares Listener feedback system works! Without your stories I just cannot do this podcast. Thankfully, Jason Schuster reached out to share his experience in a 20 year career in technology. Share in his nightmare on this latest episode!

After graduating with a BFA in theater design in 2000 I landed my first job admiring HPUX servers. I took a low ball salary in exchange for training. While I got the training it took a long while for the scales to even out inheriting an outgoing sysadmins servers when I was less than a year on the job. My true passion for automating all the things came on an off site DR test watching 2 senior admins formatting disks one at a time and building a crazy number of volume groups and luns on them by hand. DR used to be a real interesting space that having so much stuff virtualized has mostly solved. After working on various .gov contracts and then supporting internal systems for 13 years I made the jump to devops at one small startup that folded out from under me but did start me on my way.

I joined Stratasan just after new years and am loving this place. We are big fans of making boring things boring and not adding unneeded tools to our lives. Mostly I have been extending the reach of our terraform while trying to cut down the number of services we use in AWS to just what is needed. I have also been highlighting metrics we are missing to help us making good planning choices.

Live from DevOpsDays Chicago! I meet up with Ops Veteran, Michael Stahnke as we discuss his career in technology. From the weird days of AIX systems all the way till his time now at CricleCI, Michael has plenty of great stories.

Special cameos by Jason Yee and Joshua Zimmerman (our laugh track).

Michael Stahnke is VP of Platform Engineering at CircleCI. Prior to this role, he was at Puppet running engineering for Puppet Enterprise, Puppet Open source, and SRE. He is an author for State of DevOps Report in 2018 and 2019. Michael also helped get the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) repository off the ground in 2005, is the author of Pro OpenSSH (Apress, 2005), is an organizer of Devopsdays Madison. You can find reach him @stahnma on nearly any service online.

Getting paid is a pretty dang important part of your job. Mike Grayson and the team at Paychex are working to make sure that the databases that handle that are always online. This week I catch up with Mike Grayson who's been a great advocate for the database ops community.

Mike is a Senior Database Engineer specializing in DevOps, MongoDB, and Apache Kafka based out of Rochester, New York. He is a MongoDB Master and speaker in the Oracle, SQL Server and MongoDB communities.

X gonna give it to ya! Xander from the Microsoft
Azure Kubernetes SRE Team joins me to talk about his history on-call and more!

Xander is a Site Reliability Engineer at Microsoft, he currently slings containers on Azure Kubernetes Service. Previous to Microsoft, he did all the things with retail tech at both Starbucks and Target. You are always welcome to send him your favorite cat pictures.

On-call can come in different shapes and sizes. Sometimes it's a group of developers who are attacking a problem to keep other developers afloat. That's what Ben Halpern and the team at the DEV Community are up to.

Founder of DEV, Canadian, generalist software developer who writes a lot of Ruby.

This week I speak with my friend Matty Stratton as we discuss the hard times and the processes to make them better.

Matty Stratton is a DevOps Advocate at PagerDuty, where he helps dev and ops teams advance the practice of their craft and become more operationally mature. He collaborates with PagerDuty customers and industry thought leaders in the broader DevOps community, and back when he drove, his license plate actually said “DevOps”.

Matty has over 20 years experience in IT operations, ranging from large financial institutions such as JPMorganChase and internet firms, including Apartments.com. He is a sought-after speaker internationally, presenting at Agile, DevOps, and ITSM focused events, including ChefConf, DevOpsDays, Interop, PINK, and others worldwide. Matty is the founder and co-host of the popular Arrested DevOps podcast, as well as a global organizer of the DevOpsDays set of conferences.

He lives in Chicago and has three awesome kids, who he loves just a little bit more than he loves Doctor Who. He is currently on a mission to discover the best pho in the world.

Datadog Dash was this week which meant I was lucky enough to catch up with my friend, Jason Yee. We discuss his time in tech, measuring everything and a lot more!

Jason is a technical evangelist at Datadog, where he works to inspire developers and ops engineers with the power of metrics and monitoring. Previously, he was the community manager for DevOps & Performance at O'Reilly Media and a software engineer at MongoDB. He's currently exploring the world while living as a nomad and would love to hear about where you live.

Episode 30 is a waterfall of information you'll soak up and learn a ton from. Things get a bit wet and wild for Tim in this episode of On-Call Nightmares! A great discussion about a long history in tech, the things you just can't plan for and more.

Tim is an engineering manager at InfluxData with over 20 years of experience. His technical interests include high-performance, scalable, fault-tolerant cloud infrastructure, interconnected hybrid architecture, containerization (c14n?) all the way down, and always winning buzzword bingo. Helping teams achieve their highest potential is his true calling, which often means planting ideas and staying out of the way.

This week's conversation is with Molly Struve of Kenna Security! We discuss her path to tech, how her team worked to fix their on-call rotation and more!

Molly Struve is the Lead Site Reliability Engineer at Kenna Security. She joined Kenna in 2015 and has had the opportunity to work on some of the most challenging aspects of Kenna’s code base. This includes scaling Elasticsearch, sharding MySQL databases, and creating an infrastructure that can grow as fast as Kenna's business. When not making code run faster, she can be found fulfilling her need for speed by riding and jumping her show horses.

Being on-call in a tech team can lead to some interesting stories. On this podcast we'll talk to a variety of people from the world of technology, discuss their experiences in on-call and find out some nightmares they survived.

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